Impressionism and the Modern Landscape

1 RENOVATION AND MODERN VIEWPOINTS ROADS, BRIDGES, AND CITY SPACES The new European currency, the euro, carries the schematic image of an ultramodern suspension bridge 17 on its paper banknotes. According to the European Central Bank, the bridge symbolizes connected- ness and efficient communication between the various members of the European Union—effects the new currency is intended to enhance.1 In the nineteenth century, bridge building was an important fea- ture of infrastructure creation and improvement. Impressionist images of bridges were common, and whether the bridges were brand-new or simply recent, for railways or for roads, they displayed similar attitudes, though on a national rather than an international scale. In addition to serving social and economic functions, bridge building exemplified modernity in its use of the recent cast-iron technology. Bridges, as well as other types of infrastructure, physically embodied the convergence of innova- tive elements that were both causes and effects of modern change. Progress in bridge construction and urban development was monitored by photographers, sometimes working on state commission but sometimes taking their own pictures of Paris, where their studios were located. For the French government, documentation of industrial progress was a matter of national pride, and a number of exhibitions featured photographs of public works. These images were made possible by the invention of various negative processes, which in the 1850s began to re- place the daguerreotype, invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839. The paper negative had been devised around the same time as the daguerreotype by Henry Fox Talbot; the collodion-on-glass (wet-plate) negative process was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The daguerreotype produced a highly detailed image etched directly onto a silver-plated surface, but the process was slow and expensive, and its unique image could not be reproduced. Negative processes allowed photographers to work at diverse locations away from their permanent studios, as well as to produce multiple images. Paris was the site of modernity, the place where modern vision was developed. For students of the nineteenth century, such statements come as nothing new. The pertinent point is that in Im- pressionism the urban landscape was for the first time at the center of the vision of landscape be- cause that vision sought to represent modernity. And that vision was shaped both by the modernization of the cityscape and by the new photographic technology through which it was so frequently represented. The signs of modernity in landscape were not only new buildings, boulevards, bridges, factories, railroads, and canals but also topoi and points of view that had been unthinkable before il- lustrated journals and photography revealed a more inclusive artistic horizon than ever before. Scholars have certainly commented on the obvious economic growth and activity reflected in the Impressionists’ urban scenes of the 1870s. For the most part, however, these images have been Copyrighted Material RENOVATION AND MODERN VIEWPOINTS considered in relation to leisure or cited as examples of Impressionism’s realist specificity, which is often proved by comparison of these images to photographs. From a different perspective, we can con- sider the role played by urban views and photography in redefining landscape to encompass, as Castag- nary advocated, the city and the country as well as modern ways of seeing. I therefore place urban landscape at the heart of Impressionism’s enterprise of representing the modern landscape, just as the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire placed Paris at the center of modernity. SI(GH)TING MODERNITY In his seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire equated modernity with change, the 18 principal characteristics of which were “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent.”2 Similar adjectives are often associated with Impressionism. Nowhere were signs of modernity and transformation, such as bridge and road construction or river and rail traffic, more visible than in Paris, where demolition, expansion, and renewal work took over the city for nearly two decades. The protagonist of Baudelaire’s essay, the watercolorist and illustrator Constantin Guys (discussed further below), “admires the eter- nal beauty and amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so miraculously maintained amidst the tumult of human freedom.”3 The history of the renovations of Paris is well documented, but a summary may be useful here. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–73, r. 1848–70), nephew of Napoleon the Great (1769–1821, r. 1799–1815), had been elected president of France following the democratic revolution of 1848. Pre- vented by the Constitution of 1848 from reelection in 1852, he seized absolute power in a coup d’état in December 1851. On proclaiming himself emperor, he took the name Napoleon III. Through economic growth and a cultural politics that sponsored public spectacle and grandeur, the new emperor hoped to place France at the forefront of Europe and at the same time to ensure his popularity and power. These goals converged in projects for the modernization of Paris, implemented during the 1850s and 1860s by his Paris prefect, a single-minded bureaucrat of Alsatian origin named Georges Haussmann.4 Napoleon III was spiritual heir to the legacy of his uncle, who had begun transforming Paris into an imperial capital. Napoleon I was responsible for thoroughfares such as the arcaded Rue de Rivoli, public spaces such as a redesigned Place Vendôme and the Place Saint-Sulpice, public buildings such as the Bourse (Stock Exchange), and new bridges such as the Pont Saint-Louis, the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the famous Pont des Arts, a cast-iron footbridge that was the first of its kind in Paris. Under Haussmann, expenditures of more than forty times the city’s usual annual budget were lavished on clearing thousands of buildings from congested areas populated mainly by the working classes, who were displaced to less central locations. Haussmann ruthlessly declared that his aim was to “tear open Old Paris, the district of riots and barricades, with a wide, central thoroughfare that would pierce this almost impenetrable labyrinth from one side to the other.”5 He is said to have considered himself an “artist in demolition.”6 Many photographs, such as those by Henri Le Secq, recorded this process (Figure 6). In 1860 Paris annexed its surrounding suburbs so that neighborhoods in northern Paris like Les Batignolles (site of Manet’s studio) and Montmartre (site of Renoir’s studio) became a part of the city’s tentacular urban extension. The gigantic whole was intended to function as an efficient centralized machine. Copyrighted Material RENOVATION AND MODERN VIEWPOINTS FIGURE 6. Henri Le Secq, Demolitions, 19 Rue Saint-Martin, photograph, 1853. From Henri Le Secq, Album Berger, 1853. Paris: Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Haussmann extended the Rue de Rivoli and built many new boulevards; he created public parks such as the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, and the Parc Monceau. Continuing the projects or plans of previous dynasties, he endowed the city with new sewers, gas lighting, and mu- nicipal buildings, including the Halles Centrales (Central Markets), built of cast iron on Victor Baltard’s design of 1847. The new cast-iron and glass style of architecture, used heretofore in utilitarian buildings such as railway stations, was also celebrated in the exhibition halls erected for the Universal Ex- position of 1855 (see Chapter 5). The most famous of Paris’s modern buildings was the new Opéra, designed by the young Charles Garnier in 1861, though not completed until 1874. The photographers Hyacinthe-César Delmaet and Louis-Emile Durandelle documented the many phases of its construction (Figure 7), as well as that of other public buildings. Progress and modernity were thus clearly identified with Paris, which attracted more and more people, from foreign tourists and aspiring artists to workers anxious for higher wages after years of struggling on provincial farms. The city’s population nearly doubled during the Second Empire, plac- ing increasing demands on infrastructure for communication both within the city and with the outside. Even without Napoleon III’s visions of glory, sanitary conditions and traffic congestion had so deteri- orated that urban renewal was long overdue. Paris had been an impassable warren of dingy and mal- odorous habitations that bred disease (nineteen thousand cholera deaths in 1847) and crime. Hard as it is to believe today, the grand spaces surrounding the Louvre, as well as almost the entire Ile de la Cité, where government edifices and Notre-Dame Cathedral now have primary place, were once densely packed with medieval buildings. But in addition to a healthy opening up, the renovations of Paris fa- cilitated the takeover of prime city center land from its lower-class inhabitants by real estate specu- lators and their middle- and upper-class clientele. The long straight avenues, with their imposing per- spectives and allusions to the imperial urbanism of Rome, cut right through old neighborhoods. Gas and eventually electric arc lighting contributed not only to security but to the city’s reputation for “glitz,” as Zola put it, and its moniker as the City of Light. To finance construction, Haussmann granted con- cessions to builders, who lined the avenues with apartment houses that included shops at street level. Copyrighted Material RENOVATION AND MODERN VIEWPOINTS 20 FIGURE 7. Hyacinthe-César Delmaet and Louis-Emile Durandelle, photograph of the construction of the Opéra, 1860s. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Obviously, only a small percentage of the original neighborhood residents could afford the higher rents, and wealthier families moved into the fashionably bright, airy, and centrally located new flats, as is happening in many of today’s cities. Doubtless the liberal poet Victor Hugo and others were right that the new thoroughfares had deliberately been made too wide for raising insurrectionary barricades and straight enough for artillery to fire easily at protest gatherings.

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